Perils of online translators

In short the translator plugged the American phrase “Blue Lives Matter” into an English/Irish dictionary and came up with the phrase above which translates as something like “Substance they live blue”.

It is incredible that in translating just 3 words the translation got all 3 wrong.

The beautiful irony of it is this. Had the translation actually worked, if the policeman had rendered “Blue Lives Matter” into English he would still have tripped over his own cleverness. Fear gorm in Irish, literally blue man, is a term we use to describe black people. The words for black man (fear dubh) refer to the devil. So he would have been going around wearing a #BlackLivesMatter shirt.

As bad translations go though, you just can’t beat this one where a guy got a tattoo on his back of the first sentence every Irish child learns in our native language. Any Irish language speaker, even those you have no more than a dozen words, can translate this. It says “May I have permission to go to the toilet”.